Titles to Know, the Week of 7/28
Among the titles eagerly awaited next week, as evidenced by holds, is Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn; Penguin Audio; Recorded Books; Thorndike), the author’s next tile after last year’s The Husband’s Secret, which is still on best seller lists and still on hold in many libraries.
The NYT’s Janet Maslin included it in her summer reading roundup and reviewed it yesterday, saying it may have “even more staying power than The Husband’s Secret” and adds “‘a low-level bitchiness thrums throughout the narrative, becoming one of its indispensable pleasures.”
Hollywood has also discovered Moriarty. Both The Husband’s Secret and her 2011 title, What Alice Forgot are in development (The Devil Wears Prada’ director David Frankel, is attached to the latter). This is not to be confused with another adaptation of a book about an Alice with memory issues. Still Alice, adapted from the book by Lisa Genova, starring Kristen Stewart, Julianne Moore and Kate Bosworth is completed and set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
For readers who can’t get their hands on Big Little Lies, you can recommend the debut domestic thriller, Dear Daughter by Elizabeth Little, (Penguin; Recorded Books). About a former celebrity, accused of killing her mother, a crime she does not remember committing, LJ says “Fans of Tana French and Gillian Flynn are going to enjoy the smart narrator and the twists and turns in the case” and PW approves of the “entertainingly caustic first-person narrative.”
LibraryReads
Lucky Us, Amy Bloom, (Random House)
“Is a family the people you are born to, or the people who you find along the way? That’s what Bloom explores in this novel set in pre- and post-WWII Ohio, Los Angeles, New York and Germany. The story follows resourceful Eva, who was abandoned by her mother at an early age, and her sister Iris, an aspiring actress who tries to find love at a time when her kind of love must be secretive. Every character is beautifully drawn, warm, and believable.” — Kathryn Hassert, Henrietta Hankin Branch Library, Chester Springs, PA
In the Media
The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It, John W. Dean, (Penguin/Viking)
The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 by Douglas Brinkley, Luke Nichter, (HMH)
President Richard Nixon is in the media again, 40 years after he resigned over the Watergate scandal. Two new books timed for the anniversary will receive media attention. John Dean, his White House Counsel and mastermind of the Watergate coverup, later became a key witness for the prosecution, He is publishing The Nixon Defense, in which he reflects on what he learned from the tapes of Watergate conversations that Nixon secretly recorded. Time magazine begins their interview with Dean with the provocative question, “You recruited G. Gordon Liddy to run President Nixon’s dirty-tricks campaign and were intimately involved in the cover-up. Why should a reader pay for your judgment on Watergate?” His convincing response is that he may be the one person most qualified to shed light on what motivated that perplexing person. Dean is scheduled for appearances on CBS Sunday Morning, MSNBC Morning Joe and the NPR Diane Rehm show.
For readers who want to experience the tapes first hand, historians Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter have transcribed them for The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972.
For more titles arriving next week, check our downloadable spreadsheet, New Title Radar, Week of 7:28:14